This post is part of a series begun on May 21, 2007, which will continue until the U.S. concentration camps at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere around the world have been razed.
Many of us learned years ago that we don't live in a democracy, but until 2006 some might still have thought the Democratic Party would pretend to respect its own name. And couldn't we once assume, regardless of what they actually did, that Democrats would at least talk like liberals?
Voters gave the party majorities in both houses of Congress nearly a year ago, but absolutely nothing has been accomplished on the three most critical national issues of our time. I'm referring to the War in Iraq, for whose termination the election was a referendum, but which has in fact been expanded; to the Military Commissions Act of October 2006, which wiped out Habeas Corpus; and to the network of concentration camps we've established around the world since 9/11, the most visible of which is that at Guantanamo Bay.
The Democrats helped the Republicans create each of these cynical outrages, which together now represent the greatest continuing threat to our national security. The party has been unwilling to put an end to any of them, and most Democratic politicians don't even pretend to oppose the Constitutional assault called the "Patriot Act" or the continuing atrocities of state-sponsored torture. Conscience, principle and courage are not to be found anywhere.
And what of Guantanamo Bay itself? It now belongs to the Democrats.
So what's going on here?
Did the citizen die along with the Constitution? Is there nothing that those with eyes and minds can do? Should I or anyone else outside the greasy corridors of power even bother to bring up these subjects any longer? Does it serve any purpose to remind ourselves of the shame and humiliation these horrors bring down upon all of us with the passage of each day?
[fabric color swatch, otherwise unrelated to Guantanamo, from froggtoggs]